


these little wonders

by thatgirlwho



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/M, Falling In Love, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Multi, Multiple Pov, Roxy and Merlin Live, canon compliant (sort of)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-09 03:35:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12268053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatgirlwho/pseuds/thatgirlwho
Summary: In a lot of ways, this is just the beginning.





	1. realization

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ColinFilth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColinFilth/gifts).



> A series of loosely connected multiple POV stories focused on the time between the fight at Poppyland and the royal wedding, telling the story of Eggsy and Tilde, Harry and Eggsy, and eventually Harry, Eggsy and Tilde. [Based off this series of prompts](http://notbrogues.tumblr.com/post/165958647202/spymastery-as-i-mentioned-doing-just-yesterday), meaning I will try to update consistently.
> 
> To listen: [Little Wonders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fzy8p4h_eQ) by Rob Thomas.

****

**realization**

There is something to be said for your life flashing before your eyes when you die.

Harry finds the similarities, though not conceivable truths, comforting even with a gun pointed at him. It gives him something to grasp onto when his pulse thunders in his ears, fear rising in his throat thick and sour. 

There are a multitude of things that could have occupied Harry’s mind at that moment, snapshots of memories like old polaroids, fuzzed edges and desaturated warmth. Visions of his days as a boy in the south of France, resplendent with vast blue skies and the smell of the sea; the day he gained his name, Galahad, and how _Harry_ seemed so ill-fitted in that moment; strangely, the now mindless routine of him methodically taking apart his guns to clean them; the endless lifetimes of people that lived and ended by his hand; those walks home from the Savile Row when the days were just long enough that sleep was better left for later and the sun would crest the horizon over London, painting her like a worn glittering jewel. 

But what he sees is this: a flash of the sun across the sky in Kentucky and a glimpse of a boy. Clever and loyal and _angry_ , standing in his house like some unrelenting force, and letting the devastation of recognizing guilt too late soften him to something strangely, openly beautiful. An honesty, an admission, beneath the bravado and it was _because_ of him. He is sorry for that.

Harry realizes it now, _beautiful_ , with a heavy and aching heart, as Valentine reaches inside his jacket, and in that moment, the far off roar of a freeway and the buzzing hiss of crickets across sun-baked asphalt is all he knows.

That, and beauty in heartbreak. (Was it his? Surely there was not enough time for him torecognize it.)

What he focuses on is the way Valentine’s top lip twitches, in the corner barely so, and the last thing, the absolute last thing he knows he will ever think is two words:

_Dear boy._

\- -

He tells Eggsy none of this, of course. Had considered it briefly, in the seconds between Eggsy revealing his own heartache and handing him his drink.

_No bittersweet memories, no ties, never knew companionship, never been in love._

He had only lied to a certain extent. Many of these things were true when not looked too closely at, when not questioned and held up against unforgiving light.

Eggsy was not his to keep, to have; Eggsy was not his to love, not anymore. 

But he would never consider that wondrous, short-lived love he had held anything other than sweet, even when faced with his own death.

He had known Eggsy and, at the end, he knew that it had been enough.

\- -

They tend to bruises with ice packs, Nurofen and a too-full glasses of vodka clinked nervously in an alarmingly quiet plane; Eggsy’s hand is steady with the stitches he administers, steady when he motions for Harry to take off his jacket and shirt, checks him over for any more cuts; Harry wipes the spatters of blood from Eggsy’s neck and cheek and Eggsy doesn’t flinch.

They don’t talk.

Harry watches as Eggsy finishes his glass and then folds himself up into a corner seat, pulling his phone out from his pocket and frowning at it. Harry waits for some defiant gesture of emotion, of grief and anger and exhaustion to manifest itself; how close Eggsy had been to losing it all, the wretched sadness that sharpened into brutal lethality.

Harry knew that Eggsy could be just as volatile, flint-quick sparks of fury and hurt flaring up in his bright eyes, his fast words, his soft heart, just as much as he could be indomitable, unmoveable. 

He did not expect this unyielding boy to show his face now, to hide himself away after all that had happened.

Harry had wanted that boy who had stood in his bathroom and demanded a reason for all of Harry’s misgivings, all his mistakes. He had wanted to see him again.

Instead, Eggsy turns his phone over and over in his hands, staring out the window, sucking his lips against his teeth. There’s a distant, thoughtful humanity in his polished edges and sharp angles. Harry watches him as he sighs, opens his phone and dials a number.

The silence is worse now, waiting for Eggsy to speak, knowing that some spell will be broken in it’s wake. 

After this, Eggsy will not be his. 

As if he ever was.

“Tilde, babe, hey.” Harry looks away when Eggsy’s speaks, shaky, breathless, sad. “Yeah, yeah, I’m alright, I’m fine. I’m sorry, Tilde, I’m so sorry—”

Harry stares out the window, over a vast endless ocean, and waits for home.


	2. barefoot

**barefoot**

She always wakes before him, even though she hates mornings.

Sometimes, he doesn’t notice this until she’s already gone. Other times, he can feel her sitting up and slipping from beneath the cover and he always reaches out for her a second too late, his fingers catching the hem of shirt, brushing the back of her arm.

Today, he feigns sleep and watches her with his eyes barely opened. Her hair catches the smudged morning light, faint across her bare shoulders and arms. She pauses with her arms stretched over her head, her back arched; he doesn’t ask what she’s looking at, what she’s thinking of.

When she stands, he sees the faded red marks he had dug into her hips when she had straddled him the night before, when she had spread her hand over his chest and he had fucked into her with a devastating, singular need.

She takes her robe from the back of the chair and shrugs it on, covering herself from him.

Today, like most days, she forgets the door open. In Sweden, he would hear the palace waking, the comforting bedlam of clicking heels and hushed voices giving orders, her talking to the sentry outside their door, her laughter and bright, lilting voice. In London, it would be the taps running in the bathroom as she washed her face and her calling out to JB, shushing him in the hallway and the squeak of the stairs as she went downstairs.

He pulls the sheets over his head and turns to watch her make her coffee.

She had told him, the first time she had stayed the night with him, as she had rummaged in Harry’s cupboards for a french press in a shirt Eggsy knew didn’t belong to him, that she had spent a year in Paris and started every morning with a rolled cigarette and cafe noisette. At Harry’s dining room table with two lit cigarettes and two cups of espresso with milk, with her feet resting on his knees, she told him about the men she had taken as lovers there, the women she had lived with, had admired and kissed and fell in love with while she was there.

She said, with a bubbling laugh, that she left the Parisians behind but had taken their cigarettes and coffee with her.

He had talked about Harry, in a way, but she seemed to know that this house he lived in was not his, that these things were not his, that he had fitted himself into a life left behind. 

She is a creature of small habits. She is reliable and adaptable and pervasive, as she was raised to be. She wakes early and can lay in bed all day. She will steal cigarettes from Eggsy throughout the day and make a face when she smokes them on the balcony, saying she needs to quit. She doesn’t drink coffee after mid-morning.

He thought he wouldn’t be able to have this again.

She will usually light her cigarette, take her first drag as she pours the milk into her espresso, and she will usually kiss him good morning, smelling of sleep and faintly of lavender, her kiss tasting of sweet tobacco and coffee.

Today, walking barefoot and only covered by the loosely knotted sash at her waist, she takes her smoke and cup to the window to sit on the bench and stare outside.

He sits up, thinks about telling her to come back to bed. Instead, he just watches her, unable to discern what he should do or say in this moment. He had to expect this time to come, that it would all come to a head and spill over and he wouldn’t be able to contain it. That they would have to discuss this, really talk about this, in all the ways that had managed to avoid before.

“I don’t like it,” she says after a long while. “Any of this. Your job and what you must keep from me.”

“You have to keep things from me, too.”

She levels him with a steady, unreadable stare. “I do not nearly die every time I step into a state meeting.”

He slumps back against the headboard, resists the urge to cross his arms. “I’ve already done three missions. Tilde, you knew all this.”

“I did not know enough,” she says with finality and goes back to her smoke.

He gets out of bed, wrapping one of the sheets around his shoulders, and joins her. She glances at him, sets her cup down on the windowsill and leans her cheek against her bent knees.

“I don’t think I really did neither,” he admits, because it’s true. That his own missions would be small scale, close to home, set about testing his abilities, strengths and limits more than anything. That the messier missions went to the senior agents and he was held with one hand behind his back, waiting for the permission to prove himself.

He hadn’t had to go far until now, hadn’t had much to hide from her, and they both had thought: they could make this work. 

“It’s not just about the woman,” she tells him in a small voice.

He knows that; he just nods, places his hand over hers.

He doesn’t know if he will be okay with keeping all this from her, of balancing all the secrets he will be asked to keep. If he will be able to come home and face her and smile when he doesn’t want to. If he can withstand knowing that, somewhere far in his future, there’s the chance that they will not be able to endure this.

He squeezes her hand and she tilts her head up, blinks at him with downcast eyes.

“I’ve go to go back to London,” he says reluctantly.

She tugs her hand from his grasp, brings the cigarette to her lips. She sits up straight, smooths down her robs over her knees and takes up her cup. “Yes. Of course, you must,” she mutters with the cup pressed to her mouth.

“Harry needs my help, getting Kingsman back together.” He wants to reach out for her again. “He’s got nobody else.”

She nods only this time, looking out the window. Threads of broken rays have spread through the clouds, shining into the room, covering her in gold and white and grey shadows in the hollows of her cheeks, the dip of her cupid’s bow. Like this, in the quiet privacy of their room, he realizes now close he had come to losing her.

“Come with me.” He’s all at once frightened to leave her; like if he does, she will pass from his sight when he turns his back to her and he will never be able to find her again. That whatever cruel hand of fate kept pushing at him would finish what it had started.

“No. My country is in turmoil after all of this.” She leaves her cup on the window sill, one last drag of her cigarette before she pinches the smoldering end, blows the smoke out with pinched lips. “Papa wants me to be present for his press conferences and his meetings, to learn what must be done.”

It’s a subtle shift, when goes from gentle and unguarded to the woman who will bear the weight of a crown and cannot falter. He’s only started to notice it lately, catch the little differences, the squaring of her shoulders, the flint-sharp gaze, resolute and unyielding.

He wonders what she differences she sees when he’s Galahad and if she feels as far from him as he does now.

“We both have jobs we must do, älskling,” she says. It’s something like an acknowledgement, a compromise, an understanding: that they have been given these lives, this trust and burden, and it must come first. At least, for now. “The world cannot wait… but we must.”

So, he leans forward, closing the space between them, bringing his hands out from where they were fisted into the sheets so he can hold her. He kisses her, tentative and sweet and asking nothing more of her.

It takes her a moment: to grow tense, then to sigh and then her to drape her arms over his shoulders. He feels the chill of her bare feet as she wiggles them under the sheet, digs them into the back of his thighs and muffles her laughter with another kiss.


	3. power

**power**

The broach Maja had pinned to her lapel will not sit straight, the heavy jeweled twinflower tilting it to the side and leaving it lopsided. She spends five minutes repinning it, wincing at the miniscule holes being left behind in the cream-coloured cashmere. It’s a stifling outfit, tailored to fit her perfectly, the shoes pinching her toes. She hates hosiery but Mama insists on it.

She sighs, taking the pin out for the last time to set aside on the vanity when there’s a knock at her door. She merely glances in the mirror as her father enters, dressed in his royal regalia, and shuts the door behind him.

Tilde sets the pin down, not meeting the weight of her father’s gaze as he stands by the door.

It’s only after long, quiet minutes pass as Tilde fixes the non-existent flyaway hairs along her temple, straightens her skirt and picks at her hosiery, that he speaks. “Valter has informed me that we will be making our appearance in fifteen minutes. I thought I would come to tell you myself, see how you are doing.”

Tilde avoids him still, an exhaustion and irritation making her shoulders tense. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” she replied coolly.

“Certainly, Your Highness.”

This, his caustic, derisive tone, causes her to look up finally from her fiddling and catch his flat, regal gaze. It was a peculiar thing, right from when she was a small girl and came to understand the life she was meant to lead, to never be able to reconcile the man she knew as King and the man she knew as her father. They never seemed to exist, fully, at the same time. Not in any meaningful way.

Often, it passed by her with no incident, a thing she has come to accept as part of the many expectations put upon her. Other times, it enraged her in a way she did not understand.

“What use is it being called Your Highness,” Tilde tells him, “if it is nothing more than superficial idolatry?”

His reserved expression softens just a bit; the pendulum swing from wearing the crown to setting it upon it’s pedestal: apart from him but always in sight. “Your purpose, min vackra dotter, is to be a symbol of hope for our people. To motivate them, bring them together in times of despair and uncertainty.”

None of what he says is unknown to her. It’s a conversation she has had countless times, with him and her mother and her advisors and tutors and secretaries. A cyclic, monotonous exchange that she knows the words to like rehearsed speech, like the recitements she memorized for elocution lessons, like she knows how to charm and deflect and convince.

These are the things she has learned to bear, has been taught so she could be the sovereign she was born and bred to be.

She has known this and she has made herself amenable to it and, some days, she loathes it.

“It is pointless.”

“Do you think what your mother and I have spent most of our lives doing is pointless?” her father answers in kind, his watchful gaze still soft but his words impudent, demanding of her indiscretion. “Is what we have done been to no avail? Have our efforts to maintain peace in times of crisis been pointless?”

Tilde purses her lips and looks back to the pin glinting back up at her. “Det var inte vad jag menade, Papa,” she mutters.

There is a deep sigh from behind her, the resounding sound of footsteps towards her. She can’t help but tense, not from fear, but from reprimation. She knows what has been given, what her mother and father have given, to make this country better. She knows this intrinsically, sees it in their wearied faces, their hushed conversations after state meetings that run over, in their refusal to let Tilde see them falter.

He stands behind her, far enough back to give her her space, but close enough that she can feel the comforting presence of him, a pull of gravity and longing sentimentality that makes her sway towards him, of days of her girlhood where her father sat out with her in the palace gardens and taught her the names of all the flowers they found, of sitting at his feet in the evenings while he read his books and she read hers.

“We have been granted every privilege, dear Tilde,” he says slowly, surely, “and with that, a great responsibility. Our influence is not as far reaching but it is just as powerful as any. And you must learn to wield that duty with grace, nobility and humility.”

Tilde breathes out, nods. “I know, Papa.”

“You are a Princess, dotter.” He places his hands on her shoulder, meeting her gaze in the mirror when she dares look back up again. “Before you are anything else. That, you must accept before you can become the Queen this country will need.”

This, she knows.

This, she is still trying to welcome as her providence.

\- -

By the time she was twelve, she knew every secret hiding spot in Drottningholm; unused rooms where only the staff would go to dust and clean, the darkened alcoves beneath stairs, the long meandering corridors with untouched plush chairs that she would sit in, windows opened to stare out over the baroque garden in spring, listening to the gurgle of the fountain in the distance.

There had always been a guarded, suffocating isolation to her childhood, had known it from when she was young. Surrounded by people, rarely left alone even when she wasn’t being watched—doormen and wait staff always around, asking if she needed this brought to her or that done for her. 

To be truly alone, she thought, was such a luxury, such a rarity. She took it any chance she got.

She had told Eggsy all of this, who had listened so intently and so patiently, the shine of his eyes never dulled even in the moonlight filtering through the window curtains.

They talked in the dark most of the time. So close to each other she could feel his warm breath across her own lips, across her cheek.

Sometimes, she still wanted to be alone, a craving for solitude more of a comfort than a necessity. Sometimes, she sorry for taking that from Eggsy, who held tightly to her as they slept, who always reached for her hand when they sat side by side, who would go out of his way to walk around the room and kiss her on the top of the head, just because he could.

She talked endlessly of the things she felt deprived of, of rebellious, reckless youth and stupid teenage mistakes.

Eggsy talked of days without heat, without food, of knowing his father only by a picture and a medal and the stories his mother stopped telling him too early in his life. He was honest about the things he had done, the cruelty of his anger and boredom and fear, and she felt that she had nothing to complain of.

They shared a common emotion, a familiar confinement, limited by their different expectations. But how quickly things diverged from there, how quickly they lost that shared experience when they realized that they were not so similar as they had initially thought.

They shared their infrequent nightmares, the little stuffy house at the ends of the mews, rolled spliffs, the need for the other, the inability to put into words exactly what was taken from them when the conversation turned somber and too honest.

They were honest, to a point.

They shared each other and their laughter and a bed and promises of the future in the grey early morning when neither of them could find a reason to get out of bed.

Once, Eggsy had told her, his mouth full of smoke and old sorrows, that he had felt _powerless_. Powerless for so long that when he became Galahad, it was almost too much.

She had stared at him through the haze of smoke trailing after his words, not knowing what that felt like. She had so much power, she thinks, she never quite figured out what to do with it.

\- - 

Shortly after she had arrived back home after being released from Valentine’s bunker, she had overheard her father and his political advisor talking as they sat in her father’s office, the door accidently left open.

_Unrest_ , is what the advisor had said.

What a funny word, she had thought then. Unrest. As if it was a mild disturbance, less than the revolt and confusion and uproar that had followed in the wake of half the cabinet being found with their heads blown clean off.

The Prime Minister amongst the dead in Valentine’s lair.

How had they not known, the people asked. How had the King not seen this coming? How could anyone be trusted?

A power vacuum waiting to be filled and inside tumbled every possible candidate, all scrambling for a position and none with any true grasp of the gravity of the situation.

Those days, her father had smiled less. 

Those days, she had spent hours late into the night talking to Eggsy because she felt no one else understood.

Those days, it seemed like that was all they needed.

\- -

She will be expected to grin and bear it. To make cordial remarks and agreements to dignitaries, ambassadors and world leaders. Shake their hands, smile for photo ops, make vague and inspirational statements. She will be expected not to overstep her bounds, to remain impartial and composed. She will be expected to uplift her people while not aligning with any one political side.

She does not have that privilege. She is not allowed that freedom.

Her platform is not expression, she has been told since she was a girl. Her platform is solidarity.

And she understands that, that despite her political leanings, she is not a politician. She is a figurehead, wearing a crown and a title. This is what a Queen must do.

She stands to the left of her father, a few paces back, staring out across the crowd of reporters and journalists and light bulb flashes, her hands folded in front of her. Her father speaks of acceptance. He speaks of solidarity.

Solidarity.

She wouldn’t know what to say of solidarity, if she was asked. She doesn’t even feel solidarity with herself, her two separate beings. Reconciling future Queen and Tilde, just like her father.

The camera’s flash and she doesn’t even blinks. She wonders if the cameras will catch the holes left from the pin in her lapel.

\- - 

She knows it’s late, far too late to be calling him. How tired and busy he must be.

She just wants to hear his voice, even for a minute.

For some reason, she holds her breath until he answers. Outside, the sun is just starting to set, the sky a smeared canvas of blues and reds and yellows over the shadowed waterway that her room overlooked, the canal a glittering smudge of lights from the palace.

“Tilde, hey!”

She smiles even though he can’t see. “Hey.”

“How’d it go?” He sounds like he’s walking, a door shutting, the murmur of background noise being cut off. “Everything okay?”

“Yes, yes everything went well.” She rubs at her eyes, looks away from the water and the bottomless darkness settling into it, making her feel queasy and unsteady. “Everything is fine.”

“What’s up?”

She almost says, I want to come home, before she remembers that home no longer exists. There’s a hollow ache and something more severe and unforgiving; what Eggsy had lost, they hadn’t talked about it yet.

They hadn’t talked about a lot of things, she thinks.

“I thought maybe I could come visit you? At the end of the week.”

His answer is instant, genuine, true: “I thought you’d never ask.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Det var inte vad jag menade, Papa." / "It was not what I meant, Papa."


	4. waiting

**waiting**

Harry was never a man who had relied on consistency. His choices never afforded him that and he had not yet felt his life was lacking from it.

In truth, he rather enjoyed the inconsistency of this life he led. He wouldn’t call it spontaneous, since spontaneity denotes something he ultimately could choose to do; his life was dictated and mapped out just as much as anyone else’s was. Maybe, a few times, he thought he would appreciate some of his own impulse but he was still able to indulge in his whims in small doses. 

He found, in a lot of ways, it was enough.

\- -

He has started setting his alarm for the mornings. For a short while, it’s a novelty. Like a lot of things that are to become unwanted habits and rituals, it quickly becomes a nuisance and an annoyance.

Before, when he wasn’t on a mission or at HQ, he used to lay in bed until he grew bored, take his time showering and readying himself for the day, picking at leisure what he wore, what he ate, what he would do.

There are no more dossiers to break the monotony of being Arthur, enticing and thrilling in their pristine cream-coloured anonymity, holding all manner of possible unknown adventure. He’s beginning to understand why Chester was so miserable for so long, why he took gratifying, senseless pleasure in the meager scraps of power that he lorded over them.

While Harry showers every morning, he does the wrist stretches the doctor at The Royal London Hospital showed him to ease the pain. The early signs of pinched nerves and strained tendons, leading to carpal tunnel, he had been told. The doctor had recommended taking more frequent breaks, changing his routine for a few weeks, told him to buy a wrist brace. Harry had thanked him, skipped his lunch hour to look at wrist braces at the pharmacy, none of which he ended up buying, and spent his afternoon in the back room in Berry Bros & Rudd signing off on leases on plots of land through front organizations set up through Statesman.

He dresses in his trousers and shirt, combs back his hair into it’s neat part, has to pause and wait and take a deep breath while his hands fumbles with the tie knot before he folds his suit jacket over his arm and heads downstairs.

He sets the kettle on the hob and waits for the water to boil. He thinks of the stack of requisitions on his desk, the blueprints he must look over and approve, the budget to be secured and distributed, the interviews he must conduct this afternoon, the recruits he must start field. 

He thinks he is fortunate, at the very least, to be here to think about these things. He doesn’t know what else he could be.

\- -

He ignores how much everything has changed. He decides early on that lingering on the absence of all the things that had once defined his life will only do harm, only distract and hinder him from what he must do now.

He allows himself one night of pity, of drinking scotch—from the distillery he apparently now owned—in the quiet of his new home, to reflect. It only left him with a headache and a bewildered sense of displacement, aware of how he came back to London with memories pieced back together carelessly and nothing with which to ground himself. He hadn’t finished the bottle of scotch, the whisky too young, too sweet for his liking.

Afterwards, he avoids thinking of it at all.

Eggsy had tried to apologize once and Harry waved had him off; told him it wasn’t his fault, that there was no need to. Eggsy words blundered and faltered and trailed off, leaving both of them keen, flat-footed.

It wasn’t until Eggsy had already left that Harry realized that maybe that’s not really what Eggsy was saying sorry for.

\- -

In his dining room, there is stacks of frames and shadow boxes, some still in their packaging and bubble wrap, carefully taped back up after he had checked them for authenticity and any chips in the frames or cracks in the glass. 

He sees them every morning he comes down the stairs, suit jacket over his arm that he drapes over the back of a chair. He glances at them as he’s taking the kettle from the stove to fill it with water, another look when he makes his toast with margarine and jam, once more when he rinses his cup and plate and puts on his jacket.

Lithographs, oil paintings and watercolours, a new collection of butterflies on backings of velvet and secured with gold pins: pipevine swallowtail, tiger mimic queen, white peacock, diana fritillary. He makes a note of finding a Labrador sulphur and desert orange tip and doesn’t think of when and where he will hang all of them.

He’s waiting to settle in, to find a day off to get it done, to find the right places on the walls to start his collection.

Right now, he just doesn’t have the time.

\- -

When Eggsy comes back from Sweden, he says he’s going to check into a hotel first and Harry says he will hear none of it. He sends a car for Eggsy, says he has more than enough room at his place, Eggsy can stay as long as he needs.

He doesn’t quite grasp the weight of that, even after he’s done it.

So, Harry is standing in his not-yet-used drawing room mixing them both nightcaps, wondering what it is he’s even thinking, if he’s thinking at all, Eggsy’s suitcase already in the third floor spare room ready to be unpacked into the the closets and drawers. For this reason, thinking of Eggsy’s things finding their way into his house, however temporary, makes a bitter lump rise in his throat and drop like a stone in his chest. 

“Planning on redecorating?” Eggsy asks. When Harry looks over his shoulder at him, Eggsy’s eyes go wide and he says, “Saw all the stuff on the table downstairs, is all.”

“Yes,” Harry says slowly and finishes pouring the drinks into the glasses he had set out, turning to face Eggsy, who looks wearied and handsome in a dress shirt wrinkled from flight and tie loosened around his neck. Harry takes note that he likes to keep his suit jacket on, unbuttoned.

“Yeah, might take a while, I guess,” Eggsy answers as he takes his drink, slowly looks around the room, looking just as discomfited with what Harry had called his _home_. “To settle in.”

Harry had forgotten that it had been Eggsy’s home as well, that he had already made his place in Harry’s life once before.

He’s told himself that he won’t think about what he’s lost.

Harry doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything at all and takes a drink.

\- -

Every day, some time after the noon hour, Statesman will call to update him on Hamish’s progress.

For the last one and a half weeks, it has remained the same. Vitals remain stable, amputation scars healing nicely, shows no signs of waking up on his own but they aren’t concerned about that currently. Harry doesn’t say anything, keeping his answers polite and short. He asks them to send over their copies of his reports, though he doesn’t understand a word of the medical jargon that crowds out the lines of empty boxes, sharp and concise in imperfect print.

His lunch will go untouched if he hasn’t finished before they ring and he will be left with an ill, sunken feeling as he sorts through the tower of papers on his desk.

And though nothing changes from day to day, Harry still finds himself anxious, waiting for the phone to ring.

\- -

The patio doors in his kitchen lead to a terrace overlooking a garden. The brick wall surrounding it is almost completely obscured by trailing ivy, paving stones lined with potted plants and flowers, the back wall defined by a twisted, gnarled tree that stretches up and over the garden. It’s meticulously cared for, trimmed and swept and watered, once a week by a man Harry’s age, hired by the realtor, that Harry kept on mostly so he did not have to look for another gardener.

The gardener comes in on Wednesday’s. Today, Harry has a morning of interviews with tailors and architects, to be conducted with discretion and thoroughness. There is a list of potential recruits sent from Cambridge and the army to review. He has to begin training soon, find someone to train these recruits. He has no handler, no training grounds, no provisions, no means with which to prepare any of them for what will eventually be asked of them with utmost loyalty. 

The world and it’s endless, demanding affairs carries on without much thought given to whether he is keeping up.

He lays out his suit for the day. Today, he doesn’t fumble with the tie. As he’s combing back his hair, he hears the thump of footsteps on the floor above him. He turns his head upwards at the the sound of the water running a few moments later. He stands there, staring at his ceiling, listening. He folds his jacket over his arm and walks downstairs to start the kettle, make toast.

It’s early yet; the gardener won’t be in for another hour. Probably just as long for Eggsy to finally come down; he’ll either adjusting his tie, running his hands back through his hair, buckling his belt and tucking his shirt in as he takes the steps two at a time.

Harry is looking out over his garden from the closed patio doors, waiting for the water to boil, when he realizes that it’s been a week since Eggsy had moved in and Harry, for all his newfound routine and consistency, had barely noticed. How easily and comfortably he had made his place.

Harry spots the unused patio table and chairs that the gardener wipes off every week, thinking he and Eggsy should make use of it more often, when the kettle starts to whistle and he stops. 

It’s a dangerous way to think, all of this, a slippery slope of good intentions that starts innocently enough. 

He’s found himself waiting for the sound of the shower to turn on in the mornings before he finishes his own tourtine, to listen for Eggsy as he moves about the room and corridor, a strange, nameless intimacy surrounding it all. Harry standing in his own bathroom as he shaves, as he brushes his teeth, as he sits on his bed to pull on his socks and pick out his tie, wondering as he neck and cheeks start to warm with a guilty thrill what it is that Eggsy does in the mornings, one floor above him: he has wondered, does he undress in his room and walk naked to the bathroom, does he leave his clothes in a pile by the door, does he comb back his hair first, tie and shirt and trousers last, and that’s why he’s forever fixing it while he drinks the tea Harry makes him, eats the toast Harry buttered for him. 

Harry wonders: does Eggsy check his faded scars in the mirror like Harry used to, or does he avoid looking in the mirror at all.

He had wondered all these same things the first time Eggsy had shared his home. Wondered if he woke in the mornings slowly and reluctantly, or if it was all at once? Did he stretch and yawn, soft pink mouth downturned, rub his eyes peevishly, did he mutter to himself as he dragged his sleep-warm, tired body from bed?

Harry had gone into the spare room right before they were to leave the house that morning after the twenty-four hours, under the guise that he had forgotten something behind, to see the bed unmade, bedsheets and cover kicked down to the end, pillows folded and rumpled, piled on one side. 

He had left it like that. Hadn’t even made the bed before Eggsy had failed the final test, before he had left for Kentucky.

He wondered what Eggsy thought when he found the bed just the same as he had left it.

Wondered, maybe the night of scotch and the sense of loss and displacement he never allowed himself again, if it was one of the many things Eggsy left untouched in the year he had been thought dead, if it was just one more point of contact that kept them in that inbetween moment, clinging to that suspended worn heart of before Kentucky.

Harry knows he would have, the sentimental old fool he is.

_Dangerous_ , he had to remind himself, feeling agitated and stupid, as he finished patting on his aftershave, fussing with putting everything back in it’s spot just so he wouldn’t have to step foot out of his bathroom for another minute. _And entirely foolish. Inappropriate._

He keeps these thoughts, anyway.

His hands are unsteady now for entirely different reasons, from having to smooth his tie and comb back his hair and keep this fierce and secret need held out of reach.

Still, he takes out two cups and sets one aside. Fills his own cup, drops the teabag in and sets it down to steep.

He looks out over the garden and waits for Eggsy.


End file.
